Locus Amoenus

This work is a comment on the continual urbanisation of the Irish landscape. It explores the fraught relationship between people and place by focusing on the psychologically affects brought on by developmental changes, such as road construction. The turmoil experienced by these once rural communities is reflected through their recollections of a landscape that had held a profound sense of familiarity, to one of alienation.

These personal and intertwined memories however are often founded on nostalgic and romantic perceptions far removed from reality. The very notion of ‘landscape’ and our collective memory of it may be seen as a mere construct. The work endeavours to emphasize this tension by highlighting the inherent frailties of memory and the imaginative ideals of landscape that reside within our psyche. This is achieved by placing a photographic backdrop on the site of the development. An intervention is then made on this constructed set by way of hand-drawn illustrations depicting the recollections of the people photographed (those who are directly affected by the development of the road). This visual approach makes reference to the historical role of both the photograph and the illustration in shaping our perception of landscape. Showing the structure behind the screen makes no attempt to disguise the fact that it is just that, ‘a construction’, part of the post-modern fragmentation where the line between the real and unreal constantly oscillates.

The work is significant as a democratic exercise in which those portrayed in the image have a direct and active impact on its appearance. It is for them an important documentation of the memories immersed in a changing topography. Although situated within an Irish cultural context and focused on the concerns of a small, rural and marginalised community, the project may be seen as reflective of a wider societal predicament in our increasingly urbanised world.